Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature

34,420 citations from literature (mostly science fiction and fantasy) referring to real churches, religious groups, tribes, etc. [This database is for literary research only. It is not intended as a source of information about religion.]

Catholic - Knights of Columbus, continued...

"...provincial world of MadredeDios. Almost everyone on the sparsely populated stone-and-desert world was Catholic, but not Pax born-again Catholic. The de Soya family had been part of the break-away Mariaist movement and had left Nuevo Madrid more than a century earlier hen that world had voted to join the Pax and have all its Christian churches submit to the Vatican. The Mariaists venerated the Holy Mother of Christ more than Vatican orthodoxy allowed, so young Federico had grown up on a marginal desert world with its devout colony of sixty thousand heretical Catholics who, as a form of protest, refused to accept cruciform. "

Catholic - other

MadredeDios

3099

Simmons, Dan. Endymion. New York: Bantam (1996); pg. 174.

"Maria's Sacrament of the Cross was scheduled for ten p.m. She died suddenly at 8:45 p.m. By the rules of the Church and the laws of the Pax, someone who suffered braindeath before receiving the cross could not be revived artificially to receive it.

Instead of being furious or feeling betrayed by his new Church, Federico's father took the tragedy as a sign that God--not the God he had grown up praying to, the gentle Son infused with the universal female principles of the Holy Mother, but the fiercer New and Old Testament God of the Universal Church--had punished him, his family, and the entire Mariaist world of Llano Estracado... " [Some other refs. about these Mariaist Catholics, not in DB.]

Pg. 14-15: "On the desert world of MadredeDios, on the high plateau called the Llano Estacado because of the atmosphere generator pylons crisscrossing the desert in neat ten-kilometer grid intervals, Father Federico de Soya prepared for early morning Mass.

The little desert town of Nuevo Atlan held fewer than three hundred residents--mostly Pax boxite miners waiting to die before traveling home, mixed with a few of the converted Mariaists who scratched out livings as corgor herders in the toxic wastelands--and Father de Soya knew precisely how many would be in chapel for early Mass: four... ";

Pg. 58: "...delegates from the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Benedictines, the Legionaries of Christ, the Mariaists, the Salesians, and a single delegate standing for the few remaining Franciscans. "

"Loren drove into Las Animas, then slowly down the cracked surface of Cedar Street. He passed a little adobe chapel, its windows and doors painted blue to symbolize devotion to the Virgin. A miniature house of worshpi built on someone's front lawn, marking the meeting place of a few families who had come from northern Mexico to work in the mines during the Depression. Ostensibly Catholic--Bob Sandoval would have called them heretics--they belonged to some small divergent sect that had gotten thrown out of Spain in the 1600s. Another of Atocha's forty-one Welcoming Churches. "

Catholic - other

United Kingdom: England

1976

Amis, Kingsley. The Alteration. New York: Viking Press (1976); pg. 3.

"Not far from them, a third man held himself rigid out of a desire not to give the smallest grounds for offence to those many of his neighbours who made no attempt to conceal from him their often hostile curiosity. The Archpresbyter of Arnoldstown was the first holder of this office ever to have crossed the threshold of St George's, and there was some resentment at the admission of a Schismatic eminence--in plainer terms, a surpliced heretic--to today's ceremony. At his side, Cornelius van der Haag, New Englander Ambassador to the court of St Giles, had become too far immersed in the music to stir. [Some other refs. to 'heretics' in novel.]

"I had thought (I had convinced myself) that coming here [to Springfield prison] voluntarily would be little different from joining a Trappist monastery, that my deprivations would easily be bearable if freely chosen. One of my regrets as a married man has always been that the contemplative life, in its more rarefied aspects, has been denied me. I fancied asceticism some rare luxury, a spiritual truffle. Ha! "

"Raised a Catholic in Louisville, Kentucky, Vear also sometimes find himself comparing Von Braunville [on the moon] to Gethsemani, the monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, where the Trappist writer and monk Thomas Merton spent most of his adult life. "

"What was it that Thomas Merton had said on this point? Another racute observation. Vear finally recalls it: 'And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.' Exactly. You want solitude, a chance to reflect, but you don't want your retreat from others to deprive you of the company of God. That's not privacy, that's the ultimate loneliness, absolute desolation. "

"Still, '68 was the year that it all went off the rails, and that was the year that Thomas Merton died, too. In December. After the national elections. He accidently electrocuted himself with a fan after taking a shower in a cottage near Bangkok; he'd been touring the Far East discussing monasticism and meditation with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhists. Vear had always considered Merton's death--for so searching and holy a man--ludicrous, a vaudeville jape unworthy of God. But here above Von Braunville, he begins to regard it as a mercy. Maybe the Holy Spirit had been whirling in the blades of the defective fan, breathing grace upon Merton even as the fan--a fan, for Christ's sake--shocked him to the roots of his being. "

"'As for Merton,' the dwarf continues, 'well, that's flattering, I guess. Seriously flattering. But so what if we both died when we were fifty-three? Coincidence. Stupid coincidence. All Merton and I ahvein common is our unshakable faith that the Transcendent exists and that It'll talk to you if you ever decide you're worth the effort. And that's about it. That and a quest to understand whatever... we're being handed when the Transcendent finally deigns to speak.' "

Well, Merton had fought the good fight--for justice, for peace, for the greater glory of God--and his death, at the painfully early age of fifty-three, spared him the necessity of witnessing either Nixon's gutting of the Bill of Rights or the American' people's lamblike complicity in their own slaughter. Vear remembers that in Merton's Asian Journal, circulated posthumously in samizdat copies among many Catholics, the man expressed satisfaction that Kentucky had not voted for George Wallace in the '68 election but tremendous disappointment that Nixon had beaten Herbert Humphrey. " [More refs. to Merton, not all in DB.]

Catholic - Trappist

world

1999

Hand, Elizabeth. Glimmering. New York: HarperCollins (1997); pg. 89.

"'He's a kind of saint, Jack. I mean, a real, live saint, like Mother Teresa, or--well, I don't know. Thomas Merton, maybe? The Dalai Lama? I mean, I've met the Dalai Lama, Jack, and it wasn't like this.'

'Because Dr. Hanada--he had done things. Like Merton, you know. He hadn't just been in this monastery his whole life, he'd had this whole other life...' "

Anderson, Poul. The Boat of a Million Years. New York: Tor (1989); pg. 276.

"Pyotr frowned. 'I've read about those Cossack rebellions.'

Katya winced. Three centuries fell from her, and she stood again in her village when men... galloped in after riding with Chmielnicki and shouted their boasts. Every Catholic or Uniate priest they or the serfs caught, they hanged in front of his altar alongside a pig and a Jew. 'Barbaric times,' she said. "

"'Another thing,' Sam added. 'You guys have been working for a century or so to heal the rifts among other Christians. Imagine how the Protestants will feel if they see the Vatican getting special treatment from the World Court... how will the Swedes feel about it? Or the Orthodox Catholic in Greece and Russia and so on? Or the Southern Baptists?' "

"My attackers, whose arrows flew wide or rebounded from my granite throne, wore the dress of the Sahaptin group of North American Indians: Cayuse, Palouse, or Wallawalla. I identified them by their vestments and, when they audibly conferred, by certain quirks of their Penutian-derived tongue. "

"Oh, a fair number of the people in cars, on bicycles, and walking on the sidewalks showed Nuevespanolan blood. In manner and dress, though, most of them were not easily distinguishable from their Anglo-Saxon and Celtic counterparts of similar class. " [Also pg. 196.]

Celt

California

1971

Dick, Philip K. Valis. New York: Bantam (1981); pg. 32.

"The source-basis for Parsifal consisted of Celtic legends, and Wagner's research into Buddhism for his never-written opera about the Buddha to be called The Victors (Die Sieger). Where did Richard Wagner get the notion that time could turn into space?) " [Also pg. 144-145.]

Harrison, Harry. The Hammer and the Cross. New York: Tor (1993); pg. 87.

"...from the floating population of Norsemen who for generations had been moving into the Outer Isles of the Celtic regions: the Orkneys and Shetlands, then the Hebrides, the Scottish mainland. " [Other refs., not in DB. Enter novel takes place in Europe, much of it in England. But the word 'Celt' is apparently not except here.]

"Wait, he thought. I think I know what a stoppery is. It is based on the Celtic, I believe. A dialect word only comprehensible to someone who has a varied and broad background of liberal, humansitic information at his disposal. "

"They were enticing pictures, exaggerated zoomorphs and storyglyphs with a vicious edge, like the heads of Viking ships, meant to scare the enemy, or Celtic illuminations meant to confuse the eye of evil. "

"'Computer, tell me about the spread of the English language on Earth.'

...'English is the descendant of multiple languages: principally Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and various Celtic tongues. It was the primary language of England, one of three nations on a small island in the North Atlantic Ocean. IN an ongoing process of colonial expansion beginning late in the sixteenth century and continuing until the early twentieth century, England established herself as the supreme political, military, and economic power in the world.

'With the expansion of English power, the language spread as well, eventually becoming the universal language of trade, science, and international politics. By nature a dynamic and flexible language, it provides the basis of current Federation Standard, continuing to adapt new words, new concepts, and new cultures.' "

[Data:] "'...I spent last night reading the history of the planet Earth, particularly in regard to the development of myth and religion. Although there are many esoteric writings I have yet to cover, I believe I know have a basic working knowledge of the subject. Many cultures worshiped warrior gods and valued warrior abilities. Among the most notable were the Aztecs from an area once known as Central America, the followers of Ba'al in the Middle East, the Celtic members of the Cult of the Head, the followers of the Norse gods Odin and Thor...' "

Pg. 94: "...voices of a Celtic choir... traveling the stars with the lives of his ancestors, the nomadic Celts who explored ancient Europe, created a comfortable overlap. Exploration was in his blood. "; Pg. 96: "'...Dark room, Celtic music, avoiding the topic--' " [Some other Celtic/Irish references and names, but no other refs. to Celts by name.]

Pg. 2: "And then he sighed for a third time, this one intended for Himself, the stars, the Lady Deirdre, and anyone else in the cosmos who might be listening--the immemorial protest of the Celt against his unfair destiny.

...Well, admittedly, the dominant species here is supposed to have come about the same time the Proto-Celts came to Tara. We became pilgrims because we wanted to keep alive our culture; they because they wanted to build a perfect society. "; Pg. 8: "Strumming his harp, he crooned an ancient and mournful Celtic melody... "; Pg. 28: "'Is it, Seamus? We Celts are a blend of fatalism and hope--that's why we go on pilgrimages...' " [Other refs., not in DB. The future fictional society depicted in the novel is descended from Irish settlers. See also pg. 300.]

"But it was a somewhat changed version of one of the old north-of-England corpse chants, sung at wakes with the corpse under the table and a dish of salt on its breast. It was a ritual with its roots going back beyond Christianity to the ancient Celts, to a time when small dark men crept together in the forests to sing their dead kinsman on his road of shadows, in the first nights after hid departure. And the version Paul heard now had none of the solemn music of its seventeenth-century shape, but was nearly back to the harsh atonal chant of the original primitive, cold as winter stones, and unsparing as the wind across them... "

'Right. Their race was unique, descended from a mixture of Celts and a pre-Celtic stock from the eastern Mediterranean... It wasn't at all the kind of repressive thing that people were conditioned to think of later, you know. It was a very earthy, zestful, life-loving culture.' " [More here, pg. 103.]

[Book jacket] "Roma Mater combines Celtic myth with our distant memories of Roman Britain and adds a magic of its own: Ys, daughter of Carthage on the coast of Brittany, ruled by the magic of The Nine and the might of the King, their Husband. How The Nine conspired with their gods to bring him to them, though he belonged to Mithras and to Rome, is only the beginning of the story . . . " [Refs. throughout novel, not in DB.]

"Certainly this land clung unhindered to its own old ways. Cynan had been right; Christianity was a religion for towns. Frequently Gratillonius spied a cella, a Celtic temple. Even smaller than a Mithraeum, it consisted of a single square room... "

Celt

Roman Empire

359 C.E.

Anderson, Poul. The Boat of a Million Years. New York: Tor (1989); pg. 33.

"A hunchbacked beggar whined for alms in the name of Christ and then, when likewise ignored, tried Jupiter, Mithras, Isis, the Great Mother, and Celtic Epona... "

Pg. 39: "Every six hundred years, when surinomaz grew well under the influence of the Demon Star, the Shalnuksis came to Tran with a fresh crop of Earth mercenaries. Roman legionnaires, Celtish warriors, Franks. And every time, when the aliens had got all they wanted, they tried to exterminate their agents. "; Pg. 356: "...had brought in Achaean Bronze Age warriors. Romans from the time of Septimius Serverus, and again from the Byzantine period. Franks. Celts. Scythians. Cultures mixed together... "

Pg. 270: "The Celtic rush pulsed with the wild energy of a wildfire, roaring toward the foe. The British could see the Roman plan, but no one, not even their own leaders, could ever be sure what the Celtic warriors would do... Suddenly the high ground, which had allowed the Romans to get beyond the center of the enemy, became a disadvantage, for the Celtic horsemen were higher still. "; Pg. 270: "'Your support comes from the princes of Britannia,' exclaimed Allectus, 'from the men of the old Celtic blood who made your Emperor!...' "; Pg. 277: "'Perhaps they were born barbarians, but they have been civilized. They recognize that this is a Celtic land...' "; Pg. 287: "'But as I travel about, I hear murmurs. Our people--the men of the old Celtic blood--are awakening. To escape from the Roman yoke...' "; Pg. 291: "'...Celtic warriors made the walls of Rome tremble when your people were still crawling out of the mire.' " [Some other refs., not in DB.]

Pg. 322: "'King Dartweg would not receive me immediately. At first I thought his motives to be sheer Celtic perversity, but later I learned...' "; Pg. 348: "On the same day that Casmir sent off the dispatch, a courier arrived from the west, with news of the Celtic defeat and the death of King Dartweg, which meant that King Aillas and his Ulfish armies would not be preoccupied doing battle with the Celts. " [Many other refs., not in DB.]

"The Elder Isles had known the coming and going of many peoples: Pharesmians, blue-eyed Evadnioi, Pelasgians and their maenad priestesses, Danaans, Lydians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Greeks, Celts from Gaul, Ska from Norway by way of Ireland, Romans, Celts from Ireland and a few Sea Goths... Celts had wandered everywhere across the Elder Isles, leaving behind not only place names, but Druid sacrifices in sacred groves, and the 'March of the Trees' during Beltane. " [Many other refs. throughout novel, not in DB.]

'Heard of him?' said Jim, annoyed. 'I studied the Arthurian legend. He was either a myth or a series of myths which were originally thought to be Celtic, but which new evidence indicates may have migrated west with the Roman soldiery from as far as the steppes of South Russia...' "

"'...And now, my dear Watson, I think we may dismiss the matter from our mind and go back with a clear conscience to the study of those Chaldean roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.' "

"Jesse curled his lip. 'Norman bastards' Dickon had called them. It was as accurate a description as any. True, they claimed Norman descent; but in this Catholic England of more than a thousand years after the Conquest, bloodlines of Norman, Saxon, and original Celt were hopelessly mixed. What distinctions existed were more or less arbitrary, reintroduced in accordance with the racial theories of Gisevius the Great a couple of centuries ago... Most people had at least a smattering of the five tongues of the land: the Norman French... Latin of the Church, Modern English... outdated Middle English and Celtic of the churls... "

Celt

United Kingdom

1994

Holdstock, Robert. The Hollowing. New York: Roc (1994); pg. 115.

Pg. 115: "...the old Welsh tales of Celtic adventure. "; Pg. 125: "...with an intense Celtic ancestry "; Pg. 126: "'Of course, the true Celts would never have eaten hare. It would have been sacrilege. Did you know that?... The hare was a sacred animal . . . to the true Celts. They worshiped it.' " [Many other refs.]

Pg. 41: "That, and a name . . . Arthur. Arthur from the Roman family of Artoris; Arthur from the Celtic word for bear... A Celtic ruler, Urien devoted more time to hunting and cattle raids than to his new life... "; Pg. 42: "The Cumbri, those northern Celts clinging to the Old Ways, roar and howl and fight against the southern Britons... "; Pg. 43: "Not that the May Day rites include such sacrifices nowadays, but ever Celt remembers what lies at the heart of the royal promise--that any true monarch stands between the people and their Gods, willing to bridge the distance... " [Many other refs. throughout novel, not in DB.]

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